


The Sea with its Deepness

by pellucid



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 13:59:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1229041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Set late season 3, with some vague references to episodes therein. Despite having been written for a Daniel/Janet ficathon, this is really more of a Janet character study, or Janet + SG-1 fic. Beta by Gabolange.</p>
<p>Written in March 2008, for Yvi in the 2008 <a href="http://danjanficathon.livejournal.com/">Daniel/Janet Ficathon</a>.</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Sea with its Deepness

**Author's Note:**

> Set late season 3, with some vague references to episodes therein. Despite having been written for a Daniel/Janet ficathon, this is really more of a Janet character study, or Janet + SG-1 fic. Beta by Gabolange.
> 
> Written in March 2008, for Yvi in the 2008 [Daniel/Janet Ficathon](http://danjanficathon.livejournal.com/).

\--  
 _1 Hour Overdue_

Janet keeps an up to date mission schedule on the lower left-hand corner of her desk for easy reference. She never stacks anything else on top of it. At the beginning of each shift she memorizes the scheduled arrival times of all the teams, anticipates their returns, knows the moment anyone is overdue.

If the knot of dread tightens in her stomach more quickly when the delayed team is SG-1, she tries not to notice.

"Wasn't SG-1 due in a bit ago?" a passing nurse asks her.

"I think so," Janet replies neutrally. One hour and twelve minutes ago, she thinks. "They must have gotten held up."

"Hopefully nothing to be worried about," her colleague says.

"I'm sure it's nothing." Janet forces a smile. One hour and thirteen minutes.

_7 Hours Overdue_

She goes home at the end of her shift, leaving instructions that she's to be called when SG-1 returns. She carries her work cell around the house with her, stuffing it in her pocket as she helps Cassie with her algebra homework, laying it on the kitchen counter as she fixes dinner, turning it over and over in her other hand as she chats with her mother on the landline.

Her mother rattles off all the news from home: the success of Janet's father's latest woodworking project, the neighbor's fender-bender, the death of an elderly woman in Janet's parents' church.

"And you know the widow's watch house on the way into town?" her mother asks. "Somebody's bought it and is fixing it up real nice. Tore down those overgrown bushes by the road, and it already looks better. I'm glad. Such a shame for a pretty old house like that to fall down around itself."

Janet remembers the house, large and stately, set off the main road and partially hidden by the hedgerow. Only the widow's watch itself, the tower balcony at the top of the house, had been easily visible. Janet always wondered why someone had built such a house in the middle of farm country in a landlocked state.

_40 Hours Overdue_

Janet waits as long as possible before breaking the news to Cassie, and even then she tempers it: SG-1 was delayed off-world. No Saturday afternoon chess with Sam, no Saturday night hockey with the Colonel and Teal'c. She doesn't tell Cassie that it's been almost two days without news, that when SG-3 went after them they found evidence of a struggle, grass flattened from the landing of a cargo ship, and no sign of SG-1.

Janet detects a flash of disappointment before Cassie schools her features into a practiced mask of adolescent indifference. "Yeah, okay," Cassie says dully. She wanders out of the room, and a moment later Janet hears the bedroom door click shut and loud music begin to thump from within.

Sometimes Janet hates SG-1. She hates that they let her daughter love them but can't guarantee that they'll be there for her. Between Ne'tu and Jack getting stuck off-world for months, the team has been absent more Saturdays than they've been present of late. 

This uncertainty gave Janet her daughter in the first place. Cassie had wanted to be Sam's, would have been Sam's but for the occupational hazard of Sam's frequent and unpredictable jaunts to the far ends of the galaxy. 

At first Janet wondered if it would feel like all of SG-1 were her partners in raising Cassie, five adoptive parents in an overcompensating attempt to make up for the real parents Cassie had lost. They sometimes feel like a large, unconventional family: Sam's appearances for chess and ice cream and messy art projects, the Colonel's insistence on teaching Cassie the finer points of all North American sports, Teal'c's pact with Cassie to help each other with pop culture references, Daniel's habit of dropping by for dinner unannounced and always staying to help with dishes and homework. 

And then they disappear without a trace, 40 hours late and counting this time, and Janet imagines herself and her daughter standing wind-whipped in the widow's watch, left behind and waiting. Sometimes she hates SG-1. Sometimes she loves them too much.

_75 Hours Overdue_

She's in the middle of a briefing with General Hammond and SG-11 when the 'gate springs to life. They all file into the control room, and for a moment Janet stands mesmerized by the shimmering blue sea of the event horizon. Then Colonel O'Neill's limp, Sam's left arm cradled against her chest, a smear of blood on Teal'c's forehead catch her eye and she switches to emergency mode, dashes down the stairs barking orders.

Within an hour she's determined that they're all fine: scratches, sprains, and bruises only. The mission itself, three-day delay and all, had been relatively uneventful. They had been captured by some of Apophis's Jaffa, but the battalion was so riddled with Teal'c's rebel allies that they had escaped relatively quickly and easily. The Colonel cracks jokes as he is fitted for his new knee brace.

Janet is held up at the end of her shift, pre-mission physicals for SG-5 and post-mission physicals for SG-11. When she gets home she finds them all there, eating Chinese takeout in her living room with Cassie, who has abandoned adolescent sulking for childlike delight, if only temporarily.

"We saved you some kung pao chicken, Mom," Cassie says, holding up a cardboard container. 

Janet feels jumpy and irritable through dinner, like the aftermath of an adrenaline rush, a tired and distracted letdown after a trauma call. She looks around at each member of SG-1 in turn, remembers that there's been no emergency.

Teal'c and the Colonel take off after dinner, Sam offers her services as algebra tutor, and Daniel, characteristically, stays to help clean up.

They work in comfortable silence, Daniel loading the dishwasher and Janet consolidating leftovers. She's surprised when he locates the dishwasher soap without hesitation; he's more familiar with her kitchen than she realized.

The kitchen trash is full, and she ties up the bag, carries it outside, lingers on the back porch on her way back in. The spring evening is warm and quiet, and the new moon lets the stars shine brightly. Janet leans against the porch railing and takes a deep breath. She's getting better at this, she thinks. Surely she must be getting better at it, at letting these people inhabit her life so unpredictably.

"You disappeared," Daniel says from the doorway. He joins her on the porch and follows her gaze to the sky.

"I was right here," Janet answers. I always am, she finishes silently.

Daniel looks at her a little sharply, and for a moment she's afraid she voiced the second thought aloud. She meets his eyes, raises her eyebrows in a question, but he merely smiles. "Yeah," he replies. He gestures at the porch swing. "You want to sit a minute?"

"Over there," he says after a few minutes of silent stargazing. He points into the sky somewhere left of Orion.

"Over there what?" Janet follows the line of his finger.

"That's where we were. P4J-732 is somewhere in that system. Or that's what Sam's report said before we left."

"You weren't there," Janet answers, looking at the empty spaces between the stars. "SG-3 went to look for you. You were gone."

"Well, yeah," he admits. "But we were still in that system, I think. We were only in hyperspace for a couple of hours before Teal'c's friends took the engines offline."

"Does it matter if you're a few hundred light years away or a few million if we don't know where you are or what's happened to you?" she asks. Anyone else would recognize it as a rhetorical question, but Daniel, she knows, will answer. 

"No," he admits. "Not knowing is hell."

And Daniel would understand that better than anyone, Janet realizes, thinking of the years that he spent walking through the Stargate always wondering if his wife might be on the other side.

"One of these times you guys just won't come back. Vanish without a trace, and we'll never know if you're captured or dead or living out the rest of your lives on some planet with a broken 'gate." She's thought of all the possibilities. 

"Maybe. Maybe not. We can't really know, can we?" He takes her hand, and the impulse seems to be curiosity more than comfort. He turns it over in both of his as if measuring its size and weight; he traces a line on her palm. 

She looks at the sky and thinks of sailors following the stars, navigating their way home. Inside the house, Sam and Cassie laugh loudly. Janet closes her hand around Daniel's fingers.


End file.
